War for the Overworld Underlord Edition

The hoar frost has settled across the once verdant fields of the Overworld, coating the land in the icy fingers of encroaching death. In the caverns below the fires of the foundry lie extinguished for the first days in months as the development Imps close up shop to spend time with loved ones and family.

While we lock up the office and make our way out of the door until 2018 we wanted to reach out and extend our festive greetings to all our fans and customers and wish you all the very best of times. We thought we’d also use this opportunity to share a few messages, thoughts and previews of things that were, things that are and some things that have not yet come to pass.

So please Underlords before you indulge in the season’s graces read on!

Steam Awards 2017 - Thank You for Your Support!

In the Steam Autumn sale, we humbly put forward our bid to become a nominee for the Labour of Love award, the award in the 2017 Steam Awards that we felt the best fit the five-year journey since first leaving Kickstarter!

If you missed it we hastily put together a small infographic on the journey thus far which you can see below and we also shared our thoughts and feelings as to that journey in our Labour of Love and Message of Thanks posts.

Five years of sweat and toil summed up in a handy image!

It is with a tang regret that we must announce that we have not made it as one of the nominations for this award despite the best efforts of ourselves and the community.

This result was not entirely unexpected, we knew it would be an uphill battle to top many of other great games out there with incredible teams and we have to congratulate all the nominees for every Steam Award and we’d like to thank all our fans who took the time to vote for us and encourage you to now vote for the games you’d most like to see win the Awards!

Warm congratulations to the nominees, there's a lot of great games on display!

Even though we did not make the cut we were deeply humbled by the response we saw to our bid. You came out in force to support us and showed us just how much you love WFTO in its current state. You showed us that our game is something we could be proud in a way we never thought possible by raising our review score a whole percentage point overall and up to a staggering 98% recently!

Unmanly tears were shed upon reading this figure

Time and time again we’ve leant on the support of the community as we’ve gone through hard times, we’ve faced delays, difficult releases, countless bugs and issues and even the spectre of bankruptcy together and as always we cannot thank you enough. Together we’ve made WFTO into something great and the best is yet to come, inspired by your support we’re confident 2018 will bring the best version of WFTO yet!

War for the Overworld in 2018

We can’t deny that next year is going to be a bittersweet one for War for the Overworld, with Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4 travelling down the tunnels of the internet to usher in the final form of War for the Overworld in Q1-Q2 2018.

This collective update will be the largest, most involved and significant in War for the Overworlds and is likely to touch nearly every corner of War for the Overworld, shifting the game into high gear and hopefully delivering what will be the ultimate version of our first and most loved game.

Sadly we’re still quite some ways away from a release so we’re not quite ready to spill to beans on everything that will be coming, and a few of you will already know the features revealed so far but for the benefit of those not yet in the know here’s some of what’s coming:

New Singleplayer Campaign - Focussing on the Underlords and replayability factor

New Underlord AI - Built from the ground up to be more flexible, intelligent and challenging

New Veins of Evil Aspects - New units, defences, spells and more make their debut

New Dungeon Themes - New Underlords come with their own new themes, including Dungeon Hands!

More Map Editor Features - Get creative with new features in the Map Editor including My Pet Dungeon support and more!

We’ve also released a few teaser concepts in our previous posts as a thank you for all your support and to give you some idea of what’s coming. So we couldn’t well go without showing you something new today!

While our previous previews have focussed entirely on what is new today we’ll show off some things that are changing to make the game better. In particular, a number of swanky new animations coming to the game to inject some additional personality into some units whilst they work!

Please note that all previews below are very early Work in Progress versions and there’s still plenty of work to be done!

And it’s not just units getting some love, this defence, in particular, has been needing a touch up for a while

We can’t wait to get all this in your hands, but alas we’re not quite ready yet. Rest assured that in the new year we’ll be able to share so much more as our final update is realised.

After that, we’ll keep our eyes on WFTO and arrange to make some passes on supporting existing features but we’ll also be moving our team fully onto our new project, which we’ll likely share some details on later in 2018!

Happy Holidays from Brightrock Games

All that remains to be said now is from all of us at Brightrock Games we wish you all happy holidays, merry Christmas and happy new year regardless of who, what or how you celebrate and we hope that the new year will bring you all joy and happiness.

It remains to be said that until the new year our office will be closed but some of us will continue patrolling our forums and support infrastructure to answer questions or help if needed, but response times will be slower.

The end of the year is fast approaching, and our imps are hard at work on new content for you to sink your gnarled teeth into in 2018. In the meantime we have a short announcement for you: another Worker has joined the cause, and made a call for charity!

Introducing the Yogscast Worker

Indeed, this stout little fellow was recently unearthed in an old mineshaft deep in the Underworld, where he was found munching his last Jaffa Cake. He doesn’t speak much, and we don’t even know his name; but what he will do is sing about digging a hole. Oh, endlessly will he sing it! Ceaselessly!

You can acquire the Yogscast Worker and his diamond pickaxe, along with dozens of other games, in this year’s Yogscast Jingle Jam. By donating the calling price of $35, this annoyingly chipper fellow and a whole slew of incredible games and content can be yours, with every drop of the proceeds going to charitable causes!

“... I am an imp and I'm digging a hole, diggy diggy hole, digging a hole!”

Who says that a little evil can’t change the world for the better? Now please take him off our hands and use him as a Worker skin in War for the Overworld, before his warbling attracts a wandering Augre and we have a little accident.

The Cynical Imp Is Still on the Campaign Trail

Before we leave you, Underlord, the other member of our growing troupe of charitable Workers, has asked us to remind you that he is still fighting for the (no doubt deserving) cause of dungeon workers’ rights.

If you’re feeling particularly charitable, The Cynical Imp will hit the campaign trail for a small donation of £1.99, with all of Brightrock Games’ proceeds going directly to GamesAid, our partnered charity (Registered UK Charity # 1081706). They are a team of incredible individuals that work with the UK games industry, acting as an umbrella for smaller charities, to help those in need.

For Underlords willing to give a little extra, you can also get your Hand of Evil on the previously-exclusive Kickstarter and Founders Dungeon Themes - all in the good name of charity!

The relentless march towards the much anticipated Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4 continue, with great strides being made each and every day. Though we are super excited about the upcoming content, we know better than to neglect our valued Underlords that have encountered issues. So we’re rolling out a hotfix to steel you against the approaching winter months.

We also have a few announcements for you, namely reminders of the upcoming end of Steam sale, as well as the rapidly approaching closure of submissions for Steam Awards nominations!

Read on Underlord.

Hotfix Patch 1.6.66f1

Our development imps have been hard at work for the past week addressing some issues you highlighted to us in the latest patch. As always we’ve looked to resolve any reports as efficiently and speedily as possible, and we’re always looking for more. Never ones to cease our constructive efforts though, there are a few minor improvements sprinkled on top of this hotfix too.

Gameplay

Volcanic Bridge spell can now be cast on Blood tiles

When you sell a defence or construct on a Stone Bridge it will no longer also sell the bridge

Removed push forces caused by livestock and Ghouls, meaning they can no longer push other units, but can be pushed themselves

Visual Changes

Reduced the saturation on the instruction arrow, making it a little less obnoxious

Small visual changes to the Spirit Chamber

Some corrections to the possession view of units based off the “Lord O’theland” model

Text Updates

Updated Juggernaut name to make it more appropriate in Simplified and Traditional Chinese

Updated mutator tooltips to give more information about disabling Fortified Walls, and disabling the ability to dig them out (all languages)

Fixed a few typos

Miscellaneous

Updated Unity Engine to 5.4.6f3 from 5.4.5p5 yielding a few minor improvements

Please note that game engine updates are complicated affairs and can cause unexpected issues. This is only a minor leap and we believe we caught every issue, but please don’t hesitate to report anything that seems out of place.

Added secret holiday cheer!

Removed some unused audio.

Bug Fixes

Sacred Earth will now display the correct gold texture in the icy terrain theme

Fixed an issue where prisoner AI would continue to search for a bed to make in the Lair, which they could not reach, causing performance issues when a player had many prisoners

Icy terrain theme should now load more consistently

Empire Workers should now only play Empire audio

Fixed a number of issues with the Ember Rift textures

Unit animations should now slide slightly less when the animation displays them as stationary

Steam Sale Ending Soon

Before we begin the main course below, we thought we’d make a shoutout to remind you all that the Steam sale will be ending tomorrow!

The positive feedback was so overwhelming, and we simply cannot thank you enough. In our bid we talked about our journey: the work, energy and lifeforce that we have poured into War for the Overworld; the trials and tribulations that we’ve faced, and with them how the strength and support of our community has helped us drive WFTO to become something truly worthwhile. Your response has driven that home more than ever.

The fact is that there’s a great deal with the WFTO project that we were not happy with. The launch stands chief among them, where we made so many mistakes. We’ve always been hard on ourselves, but also driven to make WFTO something truly special. Nevertheless, there’s been a looming spectre of our numerous failures in the project, which has hung over us for a long time.

When we made our bid last week, we did so knowing that we had done a lot for WFTO and our customers, but not knowing what that had truly meant to you. To be told by so many of you that we deserve such a nomination was deeply touching and extremely humbling. You showed us that the work we’ve put in from the very start, past release, and right up to today is praiseworthy; and that although WFTO may never be the perfect child we want it to be, that it has some right to claim a spot as a respected title. What more can a developer wish for with their first project?

So from everyone at Brightrock Games, we’d like to humbly thank everybody who took the time to nominate us, leave a comment, or even leave us a review. We cannot thank you enough for an incredible five years!

We want to give an extra special shoutout to everyone who left a review, because you’ve raised us past the 78% barrier on Steam! This 1% may not seem like much, but it means a whole lot to us!

As a small reward, here’s one more teaser of our upcoming content.

From concept to work-in-progress VFX!

If you’re not sure what all this is about, you can read our bid for the award here. If you’d like to support us (and you don’t already have a deserving nomination for the category!) then you can do so on our store page.

We'd like to humbly request that our fans, customers and fellow Underlords consider nominating WFTO for the "Labour of Love" category. A category defined by the commitment shown by a developer towards their game and community long after the release of the game itself.

We know that this must appear somewhat self-serving and it is not usually in our nature to seek any sort of recognition beyond the appreciation we already receive from our fans for the work we do. But we felt that this category so accurately summed up our journey with WFTO thus far and where we hope to take it over the coming months.

To help illustrate our commitment we've even (very hastily) prepared a small infographic about this journey.

(Click to expand)

If you're happy with all that you can head straight to our store page if you're happy to nominate us.

For the Journey

War for the Overworld has dominated our lives for the five years since we successfully funded the project on Kickstarter, not a day has gone by where some work hasn't been poured into it on some level.

But through it all we've stayed strong, we reaffirmed our commitments to our backers, customers, fans and the game itself. We've worked hard, sometimes through nights, weekends and holidays and into the next morning to see WFTO take the shape we hoped it would.

We've released patch after patch, update after update bringing new features, fixes and releases. We've deployed platforms to help us best facilitate your needs and we've taken on board as much community feedback as we can. We have built our company, Brightrock Games around our community.

Our hope that one-day WFTO could live up to the lofty expectations both we and our fans have for it. We've done so much in the 5 years of development, not least bring a uniquely challenging and large scoped game to life.

In just over two and half years since the launch from early-access we've:

Released 56 Free Patches, 6 Major and encompassing over 2400 fixes, changes and features

Added much requested features like the Map Editor into the mix

Introduced new game modes through the Crucible and My Pet Dungeon expansions

Pushed out maps, balance adjustments and much more as fast as we can

Released three expansion

Heart of Gold - We gave away free to anyone who owned the game up to one month after launch

Crucible - Which was free for everyone!

My Pet Dungeon - Developed at huge community request, and offered on a try before you buy basis!

WFTO is so very different from when it was released and there's still so much more to come, even as we approach the final stages of this production. With Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4, which promise to be our biggest releases yet we've got some exciting things in the pipeline. Stuff like:

Underlord AI Overhaul

A New Single-Player campaign with focus on Underlords & Replayability

More than half a dozen new aspects in the Veins of Evil!

New Dungeon Themes

More Map Editor features (Yes including My Pet Dungeon support!)

And that's just what we can talk about, there's a great deal of stuff still under wraps. Just waiting until the day we can release the news and let us assure you that if everything goes according to plan you will find this to be by far the most important update that WFTO has ever received.

You don't have to take our word for it though, here are a few teaser concepts to get you salivating for more!

For us all here at Brightrock Games, War for the Overworld has truly been a labour of love and we hope that you will consider us for your nomination in "The Labour of Love" category!

If you believe that we are worthy then you can vote for us on our store page (or just grab the game at a huge discount!)

Hi guys, after a long night at the office getting ready to reach out to you we came back this morning to the incredible sight of your support. We didn't know how this would go down and we cannot thank you enough for every kind word you've written for us.

It means a lot to see that the five years of our lives that we've dedicated to WFTO have meant as much to you as it has to us, what we've seen today has been incredibly humbling and we hope that our upcoming content will be enough to reward you for your incredible incredible support!

You may recall in the not-too-distant past that we announced the return to War for the Overworld of the four languages we were unable to support post-launch; namely Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Russian. Well, our translators have been beavering away like a colony of Workers who’ve just had a Work-A-Lot potion smashed over their heads!

So lo and behold, with today’s release of Patch 1.6.66, the new localisations are now live in the game! It is our hope that they will be as well-received as our recent Chinese release.

What Has Been Localised?

All game content released after the initial April 2015 launch has been localised into Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Russian, by our professional localisation partner. This brings these languages up to speed with the English, French, German, and Chinese, and means that their translations are now 100% complete!

Naturally, this covers quite a sizeable amount of content, not least the three expansions that have come since launch: Heart of Gold, Crucible, and My Pet Dungeon!

But that’s not all. It also covers:

Subtitles for the voiced Dynamic Tutorial System

Closed captions for the pre-rendered cinematics

Names and descriptions for the full range of Skirmish and Sandbox maps

All the title-screen and miscellaneous narrator lines

Map Editor user-interfaces

Mutator user-interfaces

And more!

We’ve also updated all our major storefronts with new localisations for these languages, to appropriately reflect the up to date nature of the translations.

Moving forward towards WFTO’s final major update, we will continue to keep these languages updated. So you can rest assured that Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4 will be perfectly playable in all the languages that we support!

Why Did We Leave These Languages Languishing?

We talked about this in our previous post on the subject, and what it boils down to is that the initial translations were graciously handled and paid for by our physical-publishing partner; after launch, no additional funds were apportioned to support the ongoing localisation of content. We assessed the possibility of continued support for all languages, but unfortunately could not justify maintaining all of them at that time with the limited resources at our disposal.

We’ve never been happy that these languages fell by the wayside. But today they return to front-line service!

Community Translations

We must also once again take a moment to thank the stalwart bastion of community translators, who stepped up to fill the void left when support for Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Russian was withdrawn. Thanks to these people, there has still been an option for players of some of these languages - not to mention that they have also brought the game to languages we have never been able to support officially! So from the whole Brightrock Games team: thank you!

We cannot ever demonstrate enough our appreciation for all the hard work you’ve put in as community translators; but if you head on over to your personal developer forums on your Steam Workshop items, you will find codes for each listed member of your team. These will grant you access to the exclusive Golden Worker skin, awarded only to the most dedicated members of our community!

All community translations still exist, both on the Steam Workshop and in our own Foundry content repository; so if you as a player have a preferred fan translation, you can still happily load it in. We’re also more than happy to take feedback from our fans on the new official translations, so please feel free to share your thoughts!

Patch 1.6.66

The new official localisations were released today as part of the fiendishly named, Patch 1.6.66, which also contains a number of bug fixes. We have prepared full release notes for your perusal (English only).

Now we must leave you, and return to the depths of the Underworld; Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4 won’t unearth themselves, after all. So until next time, Underlord: Keep it evil.

The patch number of the beast marks an auspicious occasion for our fans in a number of countries over on the continent! At long last we’re in a position to update our unsupported but not forgotten European languages, and bring them in line with the English, French, German, and Chinese localisations.

As announced in our previous post, and in today’s announcement, we’re proud to reveal that the discontinued European languages are now updated and back in the game, and we’ll be continuing their support into the future! We welcome your feedback!

Updated previously deprecated European Languages to include all the game’s text updates since Patch 1.0.1:

Spanish

Italian

Polish

Russian

Added subtitles in various pre-rendered cinematics throughout the game for the above languages

Gameplay Changes

Units

Spirit

Can no longer pass through Possession Doors

Spirit Worker

Can no longer pass through Possession Doors

Constructs

Constructs may no longer be placed inside shrines or Dungeon Cores

Rituals

Assembly

Now has an effect if used twice on the same defence.

AI Improvements

Workers will no longer attack anything except rival Workers, regardless of how high their chances are to win. This is to keep them on task when working near low-threat objects such as doors.

Mutator Changes

Extra Workers granted by increasing the default minimum Worker amount no longer grant mana when sacrificed in the Dungeon Core

Undiggable walls can no longer be tagged

Wall tooltips will now update to correctly reflect if undiggable walls is enabled

With the Chinese language release successfully completed, we’ve not stopped for a moment immediately moving to address any issues that have been reported to us. The release itself has been fantastic and we have to thank our community for the incredible reception and support we’ve seen.

We hope our continued support and the features, improvements and fixes below help to demonstrate our commitment to delivering the best experience possible and that we can repay all the dedication shown by our community over the many years of WFTOs life!

We also have great news for anyone affected by the startup loading issue where the loading bar would freeze, by working with our partners at GOG.com we have identified the cause and have moved to fix the third-party DLL that was causing the issue. Hopefully this should now be resolved and you should be able to play the game. We’d love to receive feedback on this to confirm!

Read on for the full patch notes!

Gameplay Changes

General

It is now vastly easier to grab gold piles from vaults

Units

Cultist

Toned down the Cultist debuff stacking effect which previously allowed a stack of three cultists to one shot a level 10 unit

Spells

Blood Money

Gold Statues can now be claimed

On Neutral ground will remain with their previous owner

When the tile below them is claimed the statue will become owned by the new tile’s owner

Units dropped into Tavern Spitroast now fall in and play and SFX while being mulched

The Dungeon Core in the menu scene plays now a pulsating VFX as intended

Made some improvements to the Foundry textures

Map Editor Changes

The “Paint Gold” tool in map editor now places gold piles on ground tiles, in addition to vaults or wall blocks

Vaults in map editor which have had gold added (via “Paint Gold”) no longer spawn loose gold piles when removed

“Paint Gold” can remove gold from vaults and tiles

Level Changes

My Pet Dungeon

The MPD Tutorial video now has Spanish, Italian, Russian and Polish subtitles

Miscellaneous Improvements

Several improvements to game text

Removed some walls in the Main menu to reduce clipping on camera transitions

Removed unnecessary logs which could eventually cause the game to slow down

Bug Fixes

Crashes

Fixed an issue with a GOG Library causing an loading error which prevented some users from starting the game, becoming stuck on the loading screen

SFX

Fixed an issue where the Oculus slimy SFX continued playing even if it has been killed (until fully rotten) or transformed into a golden statue

Levels

Fixed an issue that made a loaded skirmish map incompletable when it was saved a split second before the win condition was met

Rooms

Fixed an issue that made Garrison duplicate its buff on blocks in range each time it was reactivated

Fixed an issue where the Beast Den would never be upgraded if a non-upgraded Beast Den was removed before upgrading

Fixed an issue where the Garrisons active state ring would not show after saving and loading

Fixed an issue which would made prisons with a certain non rectangular diagonal layout (stair like) spawn rats into the map origin (location 0,0,0) rather than into the prison, after many months of listening to walls and yelling “They’re in the frakin ship!”

Units

Fixed an issue where units would not be removed from minimap when not killed by a normal attack (eg. tortured)

Fixed an issue where dropped units never have shields again if "Always show" is selected for shields in the options menu

Fixed an issue which caused log spam when a flying unit was fleeing too low over chasm, probably causing the game to lag for a moment

Map Editor

Fixed map editor placed doors were logically closed but visually open when they were set to open and “Disable AI Control” was selected

Environment

Fixed an issue which made artefacts not disappear from the artefact panel after being used when they were already present in a save game

Misc

Fixed an issue where the menu scene would not transition to the correct part of the menu dungeon after the Load button was clicked

Following our update last month we’ve been hard at work returning to the world of War for the Overworld, and beginning to pile in on the upcoming Patch 2.0 and Expansion 4. While we work on these we have a few more items of news to announce, not least that there are currently big discounts across WFTO content, to coincide with our new patch!.

But first of all we have a big announcement for a growing portion of our community!

China Release, Dragon Worker Skin, and New Sale!

We’re happy to announce that for the past few months we’ve been working on a Chinese localisation of the game. This work is now complete, and as of today we have officially launched WFTO in China, with both simplified and traditional localisations!

People of China, meet the people of Kairos!

As such, we’d like to issue a very warm welcome to all our Chinese fans, who have been extremely patient as we worked towards localising the game. We hope that it was worth the wait! We’d also like to thank the community translation teams, who handled the Chinese translations until now (these of course are still available as well).

When loading into the game you’ll now find the new language selections in the Options menu. If your computer has either simplified or traditional Chinese selected as its default language, the game should load into that language automatically. The whole game has been completely translated from start to finish, but please let us know if there’s anything missing!

To celebrate the Chinese launch, our perky mascot, Stumpy the Blood Imp, has donned a delightful new costume, to show his appreciation to all our Chinese fans!

Enter the Dragon

Any player who launches the game between now and the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations (February 2018) will unlock the Dragon Worker skin for use in game. Once the celebration has passed, the skin will then only become available to unlock during future Chinese New Year festivals. So don’t miss your chance to grab this awesome new skin!

But that’s not all we’re doing to celebrate the new release! From 5th to 18th of October there will be big discounts across all WFTO content on Steam, GOG.com as well as a number of other partners, not least a 70% discount on the base game!

Patch 1.6.4 Now Live!

And still there’s more! We’ve spent the last few weeks working on a few new features, improvements and fixes to help further enhance your experience in WFTO. As such, Patch 1.6.4 is now seeing the light of day, and it’s certainly not insignificant!

Significant performance improvements which should yield positive results especially on lower specced GPUs, up to 25% gains in FPS and reduced Stutter.

Dozens of changes and bug fixes

European Languages Return

With all this talk about the Chinese localisation, we’re sure there are many of our fans wondering about the existing and deprecated European languages - namely Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Polish, which we’ve unfortunately been unable to maintain since the original launch.

We’ve talked at length about this decision in the past, but the long and short of it is that the initial localisations were handled by our physical publishing partner, who graciously arranged and paid for the localisations. After release, no additional funds were apportioned for the maintenance of these languages, and upon making our cost assessment, we could not justify continued support for all languages at the time.

We’ve never been happy with this state of affairs, and we know that this feeling is reflected across our fan base. We’ve always wanted to return to the deprecated languages, and now we’re finally in a position to do so.

So we’re proud to announce that at long last we’re once again working with our localisation partners, to return official and complete support to Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Polish languages. This process will be commencing hot on the heels of the Chinese release, though it is a substantial undertaking (WFTO is a surprisingly text-heavy game) - we will update you on progress over the coming months.

We’d like to thank all our fans for their patience in waiting for these localisations. We know it has been a difficult road, and we’re sorry for the delay in returning these to active status. We’d also like to thank those that have stepped in with community translations - these will of course be going nowhere, and will still be available from the Steam Workshop, should you prefer to use them.

So, that just about wraps up our update. Don’t forget the big discounts that are now available on WFTO content for the next two weeks. Until next time, Underlord: Keep it evil.

As part of the unleashing the huge undertaking of supporting an entirely new language we’ve developed a large number of fixes and improvements to your game! Want to know more about the aforementioned language? Read here! Otherwise, read on for all the awesome changes that have come in Patch 1.6.4!

Chinese Language Support

As of today War for the Overworld is now available in Traditional and Simplified Chinese, you can read our full announcement here.

Special Worker Skin - Dragon Worker

To celebrate the Chinese release we’ve unleashed a special worker skin upon the world.

The Dragon Worker has a very special unlock condition, upon logging into the game between now and Chinese New Year (In February) you will be treated to a special achievement and find the new worker already available in game.

Should you miss this window it will be available again every Chinese New Year!

New Maps

Once again we’re introducing a number of new maps all loving crafted by our excellent team of volunteer QA members. As always a huge thank you to them for their time and efforts, be sure to give them a pat on the back if you see them.

Localisation & Community Translations

Cutscenes now showing subtitles on all cinematics

Improved reliability of game loading into the correct language

Performance Optimisations

We’ve implemented a number of significant performance optimisations which should greatly enhance game experience, especially on lower end GPUs. We’re really pleased with these improvements and of course we’ll continue to keep seeking opportunities to further improve the performance of the game.

Numerous Performance Optimisations with up to 25% increased FPS and reduced stutter:

Implemented a new deferred renderer

Optimised Unit Shields

Improved Minimap Performance

Refactored a number of older scripts for to improve performance in newer Unity versions

Improved Animations to reduce memory & rendering load

Improved Floating Emoticon performance

Optimised dynamic battle music performance

General pathfinding performance improvements

Huge vaults now build and destroy much faster

Sound Changes

Vastly improved battle music system to improve reactivity in combat

Sound Effects volume slider now affects more sounds

Spirits now play an appropriate death sound

Added an attack sound to the Archon

Improved Audio Levels during cutscenes

Visual Changes

Piggy Projectiles in the tavern are now appropriately flambeed

Improved image quality of Floating Emoticons and Unit Shields

Improved Animations when units eat piglets in the Slaughterpen

Added a new Kasita Hand and Pickaxe

Improved Cutscene Quality

Added Warden Work Animation

Added VFX on Juggernaut Work

Traing dummys in the Barracks are now more reactive to hits

Improved menu transitions

Improved visuals on the Wormhole potion

Brightened the Walls, Floor and Tiles of the Mira theme to bring them in line with the rest of the theme

Improved Alchemy Lab lights

Updated the main menu

Chunders now play work animation

Skarg plays sleep animation

Fixed brightness of the campaign map

Realigned torture chamber vfx

Multiplayer Changes

The minimum character limit for creating a lobby in Multiplayer has been reduced to 1

Level Changes

Lockshackle (My Pet Dungeon)

Beasts will no longer become angry on this level

Skirmish Maps

Styx

Replaced Artefacts of Greater Sin with Artefacts of Sin

SeasteadII

Added extra outer defenses for the Empire

Changed inner water areas to use Empire Water tileset

Changed Wooden Bridges to Empire Granite Bridges

Changed Artefacts of Greater Sin back to Artefacts of Sin (unintended change)

Set Destroyable setting of Empire Gateways to True so they can no longer be captured.

Populace

Moved the Core of all players closer to the middle of the continent, distance between players is now equal

We have a short and sudden announcement today regarding the pricing of War for the Overworld for several regions around the world, as well as our pricing strategy moving forward. This is all part of our continuing efforts to be as transparent as possible in our business practises, and should in no way reflect on any company other than ourselves.

We’re making this announcement today to make it clear why certain actions are being taken and because we didn’t want you, our customers, to be caught off guard.

What’s This All About?

As you may be aware, regional prices on Steam are advised by Valve, and yesterday we received an email informing us that they had updated their pricing matrix.

The changes have introduced several new currencies into Steam’s systems to offer a better customer experience for these regions. They have also adjusted existing prices to better reflect the strength of those currencies against the US dollar, and the local purchasing power of those regions. As such, with the exception of the USD, which prices are based off, and the Euro, which remains unchanged, all other currencies in the matrix now have new advised values. Items have either increased or decreased in price from their current standings, in most cases by relatively minor amounts.

As this is the first major change to advised regional pricings for many years, we have considered the advised changes carefully, weighing up the repercussions for both ourselves and our customers. We’ve considered how this works into our continued support of WFTO and our future as a company, as well as how it may affect your lives.

From this careful deliberation we have decided not to follow the advised changes to the letter. Rather, we will only be adopting the advised prices where the relative cost of the game in local currencies has decreased compared to previous values. We will not be increasing the price of the game for any region.

Why No Increase?

As a business we recognise the need to maintain appropriate levels of pricing, as the strengths of various currencies and buying powers across the world fluctuate; the advice offered by Valve in this regard is both appropriate and fair.

It is a fact that many economies are in very different positions to where they were years ago, when these prices last changed, and that in most cases the price of video games has not risen in line with inflation, despite increasing development costs. Simply put, Valve’s advice is something that we expect many publishers to follow, and we believe that for the good of the industry this is a sensible action.

With that said, Valve also advised developers to “always do what’s best for your players”, and this is something that resonates strongly with us. As a team of not just dedicated developers but also gamers and consumers, we want to ensure that the game can continue to reach a wide audience who will enjoy it for years to come.

As a British-based developer, we know firsthand what it’s like to live in a country where the economy is in flux due to recent political changes; we know what it’s like to feel the squeeze of a currency weakening, and we don’t want that to be a barrier to the enjoyment of our games.

Furthermore, we do not wish latecomers to feel as though they are punished, especially as WFTO is now an ageing game - one which is still supported and developed, but ageing nonetheless. We do not believe it would be as fair on those affected by price increases as it might be for a new title.

We also believe in pricing our products based on our perception of what is fair for the work we’ve dedicated to them, and for now we do not feel that there is a need to increase any prices to achieve this.

The Future

With all this said and done, we plan to review our pricing at least once a year, and we can’t say what will happen when we do so. We cannot rightly say that price increases will be off the table if we feel they are appropriate, though they will always be carefully considered; and regardless of any changes, we’ll be sure to inform you appropriately. Rest assured that we would never ever increase the price of any of our products without giving you a window of warning.

It should also go without saying that we will of course follow Valve’s guidelines for any future titles, and as such you can expect the next expansion to use the advised pricing structure. But as always we will aim to ensure that our prices are not only fair for our team but also our fans.

And of course we’re always happy to receive feedback from you on any of these matters. It’s important to us that you feel your voice is heard, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch through any of our channels. Now, after that incredible wall of text, here’s the nitty-gritty of the changes:

Reduced Regional Prices

The pricing of all WFTO products in the following currencies has been reduced to reflect the new pricing matrix. We have submitted the pricing changes and expect them to be approved by Valve within the next few days, so if you're amongst the following currencies keep your eyes peeled for reduced prices in the near future.

Edit: These changes have been approved by valve now and should be live.

Indonesian Rupiah

Malaysian Ringgit

Philippine Peso

Singapore Dollar

Thai Baht

Korean Won

Indian Rupee

Chilean Peso

Peruvian Nuevo Sol

Colombian Peso

South African Rand

Hong Kong Dollar

Taiwanese Dollar

Saudi Arabian Riyal

Emirati Dirham

CIS Territories USD Regional Price

New Currencies

The following local currencies are now supported by Steam, and as such these regions have new prices in line with the pricing matrix. As above we have submitted the changes to allow these currencies and expect them to be approved in the coming days and weeks. The actual time will depend on Steam of course.

Edit: These changes have been approved by valve now and should be live. However we can not confirm this and if you do not see your currency it is likely that Valve has not officially launched them yet and may be waiting for more developers. If that's the case there's no timescale for the launch but we'd certainly expect them this year, probably in the coming weeks.